After the Crash (pb)

Designing a Depression-Free Economy

This collection of selected works by Mason Gaffney is the latest volume in the series Studies in Economic Reform and Social Justice from The American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Edited and with an introduction by Clifford W. Cobb, the book analyzes in a unique way the causes of the current crash by showing how such events derive from real estate bubbles and their interactions with banks and other lenders.

Gaffney provides a distinctive framework for analyzing macroeconomic issues, which can offer a useful counterpoint to Keynesian, monetarism, rational expectations theory, and general equilibrium analysis. It reviews sympathetically the function of banks and deposit creation and warns against banks' monetizing speculative and volatile land values by using them as collateral. Finally, this book criticizes orthodox economists for conflating land and capital in their thinking and their theories, and trivializing the value of land in their data sources.